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The new literalism plaguing today’s movies

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231 points frogulis | 2 comments | 15 Jul 25 03:52 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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somenameforme ◴[15 Jul 25 04:23 UTC] No.44567805[source]▶
Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002. [1] All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.

And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!

Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.

[1] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

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isk517 ◴[15 Jul 25 15:05 UTC] No.44571905[source]▶
A major contributor to Titanic being the best selling movie by tickets sold is the amount of people that went to watch it multiple times, and going to see a movie multiple times in 1997, while not common, was not unusual because it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?
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ks2048 ◴[15 Jul 25 16:51 UTC] No.44573224[source]▶
> because it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?

I can't tell if this is sarcasm.

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1. isk517 ◴[16 Jul 25 18:39 UTC] No.44585501{3}[source]▶
Half sarcasm and half serious. Obviously there were a lot of things to do back then, but also this was a time before everyone was carrying around a device that let you contact everyone else and access information about what is going on around you. Movies were a very heavily advertised things to do, the movie theater provided both a place as well as a time to meet your friends, and watching a movie at home meant gambling that the rental place would even have what you were looking for and provided a experience that was a very noticeable step down from going to the theater.
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2. isk517 ◴[16 Jul 25 19:11 UTC] No.44585798[source]▶
Also, depending on where you lived, going to the movie may well have been one of the only things to do.